HYPODERMIC NEEDLE AND A BOTTLE OF PILLS FOUND IN PAUL GRAY’S HOTEL ROOM?

I feel icky just writing about this.

When a young guy like Paul Gray passes away so suddenly, and he’s a rockstar, and he’s a rockstar who has been arrested for crashing his Porsche while in possession of needles, cocaine and weed, your mind, unfortunately, goes pretty much right to one place: “He overdosed.” And after Drowning Pool’s Dave Williams and Evile’s Mike Alexander both died young, and everyone said “overdose,” and then it turns out they didn’t overdose, well – you don’t wanna jump to any conclusions. You wanna wait for the doctors to do their thing and tell you why the guy passed away.

Which is all well and good. But now TMZ (there’s that icky feeling again) has obtained the 911 call an Urbandale hotel employee placed on Monday after finding Gray’s body, and the employee reports seeing a hypodermic needle and a bottle of pills in Gray’s room, and even speculates that Gray died from an OD.

Now, again, right now, this is gossip. It’s speculative. And I would like nothing more than for it to turn out to be nonsense. (Well, maybe one thing more: that Gray hadn’t died in the first place.) You wanna think that a young guy whose career still had many good years left and who had a young family he’s now left behind didn’t throw it all away shooting some shit into his veins. You want Paul Gray to be like Dave Williams and Mike Alexander – guys who weren’t just a sad cliché.

So right now we should just treat this as rumor until the toxicology reports from Gray’s autopsy come back. And maybe this is asking too much, but I think it would be really nice if we could steer clear of certain types of remarks in our comments section below. If Paul Gray really did overdose, we can have a debate about the dangers of addiction and how much or how little sympathy you feel towards addicts later.

-AR

[via Blabbermouth]